So might scream a mock headline for “Whorl Inside a Loop,” a funny and moving new play, starring Sherie Rene Scott, that opened at Second Stage Theater on Thursday. Unlike the rest of the cast, Ms. Scott doesn’t actually wear one of those unflattering orange jumpsuits that have become a pop-culture meme, thanks to a certain Netflix series. No, portraying the Volunteer, as her character is referred to, and not an inmate, Ms. Scott wears street clothes, although she learns on her first visit to the prison that the underwire in her bra will make the metal detector “angry,” as the guard wryly puts it.

Written by Dick Scanlan and Ms. Scott, and directed by Michael Mayer and Mr. Scanlan — who all collaborated on “Everyday Rapture,” which began life at Second Stage and later transferred to Broadway — “Whorl Inside a Loop” is another adventure in Ms. Scott’s autobiography, although a considerable amount of fiction has been blended into the telling.

The Volunteer is, yes, an actor with a history on Broadway (now appearing in — ack! — “Conquistadors the Musical”), who has agreed to donate her time, or so we at first assume, to teach a dozen classes at an unnamed maximum-security prison. She shares the perky, wholesome demeanor and ready, self-aware humor Ms. Scott displayed in “Everyday Rapture.” But the generic designation suggests that here we are in more imaginative territory, although the show is based on Ms. Scott and Mr. Scanlan’s experience leading classes on “personal narratives” at a prison in upstate New York.

Ms. Scott is the only female member of the cast, and the only white one. The half-dozen other performers are black men who portray the inmates the Volunteer works with, and also numerous ancillary roles, like the prison staffers and the Volunteer’s gabbling friends and family, with whom she shares her tales of life (temporarily) behind bars. The show is cleanly but dynamically staged on a bare wooden platform, with metal folding chairs and a few simple props suggesting the antiseptic oppression of prison.

As the show’s creators well know, the drama here is not primarily in the interactions between the Volunteer and her students or her coterie of friends — which are often funny but hardly momentous — but in the dark trajectories of the men’s lives that are revealed as she leads them to turn their experiences into shapely monologues.

Their hard upbringings, the unhappy circumstances that led them into crime, the sometimes scandalously long sentences they received: These histories make for riveting, disturbing theater, and as recounted by the superb cast, they open windows into the lives of men whose stories mostly go untold, except in investigative journalism. (The script was created with “additional material” from Andre Kelley, Marvin Lewis, Felix Machado, Richard Norat and Jeffrey Rivera, some of the prisoners Mr. Scanlan and Ms. Scott worked with.)

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From left, Derrick Baskin, Nicholas Christopher, Donald Webber Jr., Sherie Rene Scott and Daniel J. Watts in “Whorl Inside a Loop,” which Ms. Scott wrote with Dick Scanlan.CreditCaitlin Ochs for The New York Times

The men in the class are all convicted murderers, although the staff member in charge of prison activities adds that one has been wrongly convicted. (“Can I sit next to that one?” the Volunteer pleads, barely joking.) But she soon establishes a friendly if slightly skittish rapport with them. Ms. Scott deftly modulates her character’s warm, bubbly persona at times to suggest her evolving levels of anxiety.

As the play unfolds, toggling between scenes of the Volunteer’s weekly visits and her discussions of them with her besties, the play becomes something of a whorling loop itself. (The title refers to a distinctive pattern in a fingerprint that the Volunteer provides to enter the prison.) Outside, and with the eager encouragement of a producer friend, a plan is hatched to create a play — the one we’re watching, more or less — using the testimonies of the men. Will Broadway beckon? And, more important, does the Volunteer have the right to appropriate the experiences of her “students” for her own purposes?

Inside the prison, mention of a possible play leads to the assumption that the men will be performing an evening stitched together from their monologues for the other inmates, perhaps the parole board, and, in a somewhat suspect plot twist, perhaps even Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom Ms. Scott’s character meets at her hair salon. (There’s a kernel of truth here, I’m told.)

The play raises timely issues about the overwhelming number of African-American men in prison; the importance of rehabilitation, as opposed to plain punishment; and the imperfect workings of the justice system. As the Volunteer observes at one point, “I think that I’ve done things that, if I were a black man, I wouldn’t have gotten away with.”

Vivid writing and superlative performances effectively humanize each of the prisoners. Derrick Baskin brings an affecting air of naïveté to his character, nicknamed Sunnyside, whose life took a dark turn at 13, after he saw his mother being arrested. Also imprisoned while still in his teens was Jeffrey, played with a sober, soft edge by Chris Myers. His life fell apart when his mother contracted AIDS; having lost his way, he confessed to a killing he didn’t commit. As he puts it bleakly, “After 14 years, I am still 16 years old.”

The other actors are no less terrific. Nicholas Christopher, as Rick, recalls in chilling detail witnessing another inmate kill a prison official who had denied him the chance to attend his mother’s funeral. Ryan Quinn, as Source, shies away at first from performing the story of his crime, saying with quiet force that speaks to his powerful sense of regret, “Re-enacting it feels like glorifying it.” Daniel J. Watts gives a fiery reading of his character’s narrative, which has the driving rhythms of rap. And Donald Webber Jr., as Bey, unfolds the haunting story of a childhood encounter with a sheriff that may have marked him for life and led to the crime he committed.

“Whorl Inside a Loop” does not come across as agitprop howling for prison reform. While most of the men admit to great remorse for their crimes, some also acknowledge that what they did was heinous enough to deserve the long stretches in prison.

But it’s hard to listen to their stories without sorrow over how their early experiences — of poverty, abandonment, drugs, neglect — may have (must have) shaped their trajectories. And to sympathize when the Volunteer simply but eloquently describes their narratives as “stories about guys who’ve lost their lives, but are still living.”